What’s a DDoS Attack? Definition and Examples

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a cyberattack, sourced from a distributed network, that goals to disclaim responses out of your services. A DDoS attack goals to render your services unresponsive by overwhelming your systems with illegitimate requests.

Increasingly businesses and site owners are asking themselves, what’s DDoS? They’ve seen other corporations fall prey to a cyberattack and need to know the way to prevent it from happening to them.

In February 2020, Amazon Web Services was hit by a large DDoS attack that lasted almost three days, also impacting countless other publishers and site owners that depend on AWS. The targeted IP address saw a rise of 56-70 times the quantity of information normally sent.

In 2018, GitHub was hit with the biggest DDoS attack recorded at the moment. Despite flooding GitHub’s servers with 1.3 terabytes per second (Tbps) of information and 126.9 packets per second (Pps), the attack only took GitHub offline for 20 minutes on account of Github’s strong DDoS protection measures.

This highly variable level of efficacy and risk shows that corporations must prioritize mitigating damage from potential DDoS attacks. These cyberattacks are only growing as more traffic comes online and sensitive data and services proceed to carry value.

On this post, we’ll cover the next areas along the lines of what’s DDoS:

• What’s DDoSing?
• How will you detect an attack?
• What are some examples of DDoS attacks?
• What are the differing kinds of attacks?
• How do I protect against these attacks?

Perhaps a very powerful aspect of protection against DDoS is early detection. In case your organization can discover the DDoS attack early on, you’ll be able to take steps to mitigate the damage, limit traffic, and improve security going forward.

So, what’s DDoSing, and how will you detect it?

A DDoS is what happens when your servers, website, applications, infrastructure, or other assets are flooded with requests from malicious actors attempting to bring down or take your services offline. While security measures vary across hosting solutions, even essentially the most hardened dedicated server hosting should still be vulnerable to a DDoS attack.

It might be difficult to find out when a DDoS attack is happening versus a legitimate failure of service. DDoS attacks can often appear as legitimate traffic or downed servers. With a purpose to discover an attack with certainty, further investigation with analytics tools may also help spot among the signs of DDoS:

• A suspicious spike in requests to a single page.
• Downed applications or servers with out a history of compromise.
• Large amounts of traffic from one single IP address or a spread of IP addresses.
• Traffic coming from users with similar characteristics.
• Spikes in traffic patterns at odd hours or otherwise non-typical traffic patterns for what you are promoting or site.

Detecting DDoS can be about awareness and ensuring you’re conversant in some examples of attacks. Let’s break down several kinds of DDoS attacks to indicate how DDoS protection does work.

What’s DDoS in the true world? We already mentioned among the high-profile attacks on Amazon and GitHub. These real-world examples may give us a greater idea of what’s trending amongst cybercriminals and the way we will bolster DDoS protection in the longer term.

One among the primary recorded DDoS attacks occurred in 2000 when a teenage hacker by the pseudonym “MafiaBoy” was capable of flood a lot of universities and businesses with overwhelming traffic. It’s fair to say that DDoS has evolved exponentially since that point, and it’s still affecting major industries today.

Only months after the February 2020 cyberattack against AWS, Google revealed details of a DDoS attack targeting their services and registering even higher at 2.6 Tbps. Firms of all sizes are in danger from this growing cyber threat.

DDoS attacks may be categorized into three foremost groups based on what layer of service they aim: volumetric attacks, protocol attacks, and application attacks. Let’s examine each and understand how they could affect a site with VPS DDoS protection.

Volumetric attacks are perpetrated when massive quantities of illegitimate traffic overwhelm your server, website, or other resources. Also often known as volume-based attacks, volumetric attacks are measured in bits per second (BPS). Several kinds of volumetric attacks include User Datagram Protocol (UDP), Web Control Message Protocol (ICMP), and junk flood attacks. 

So simply put, what’s a DDoS attack when it’s volume-based? Volumetric attacks are like a traffic jam. Imagine going to work and pulling onto the on-ramp only to see that each lane on the highway is bumper-to-bumper with cars. You’re stuck and might’t get access to the road. Unlike a traffic jam, nevertheless, traffic doesn’t just wait in line. Users will see the dreaded “No Connection Error,” or the load times will slow to the purpose of causing frustration, causing users to desert their original request.

Protocol attacks occur when your infrastructure, or parts of your infrastructure, is flooded with excessive numbers of packets. Also often known as network-layer attacks, protocol DDoS attacks are measured in packets per second (Pps). Several types of protocol attacks include Smurf DDoS, TCP Connection Attacks, or TCP SYN Floods.

SYN Floods (also often known as TCP Connection Attacks) goal what’s called a three-way handshake connection. This common TCP connection point is the vulnerability the attack exploits.

During an SYN Flood, a “handshake” request is shipped to a targeted server, nevertheless it’s never accomplished. The targeted port is then unavailable to reply to any requests. The attack spreads from there as an increasing number of requests are sent until servers go down.

A solution to – What’s DDoS? – wouldn’t be complete with out a take a look at the attacks’ effects on applications. Application-layer attacks overwhelm applications with malicious requests, affecting the layer of service where web pages are generated, and HTTP requests are made. These application DDoS attacks are measured in requests per second (RPS).

Application-layer attacks are inclined to advance in a slower fashion than traditional volumetric attacks. This slower rate allows the requests to look legitimate until they’ve sufficiently overwhelmed an application. 

It’s necessary to keep in mind that these several types of attacks often work in tandem with one another. It’s rare that a cybercriminal will focus all their efforts on one endpoint. For instance, an initial application-layer attack could also be followed by a volumetric attack. Site owners must play defense on all endpoints to make sure the detection of every style of DDoS attack.

Up to now, we’ve answered – what’s a DDoS Attack? And we’ve checked out several types of attacks and detection. But how does DDoS protection work?

In terms of protecting your server from a possible DDoS attack, it’s necessary to be vigilant from a proactive perspective. Some useful concepts to think about within the realm of DDoS protection include:

• Learn Your Traffic Patterns: With help from network and server monitoring tools, you have to get a way of your typical inbound traffic. When it spikes sharply or is clocking way above the conventional range, you’ll be able to take the suitable measures. It’s value mentioning that it is best to also monitor activity during an attack to assist decipher the reasoning behind the attack.
• Higher to Be Secure than Sorry: Along with mitigation tools and over-provisioning bandwidth, think about using an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and an Intrusion Protection System (IPS) for early attack detection, filters to dam packets from the same old suspects, dropping all malformed/spoofed packets, and lowering your thresholds to your SYN, ICMP, and UDP Flood drops.
• DDoS Mitigation Tools Are a Must: For big or particularly complex DDoS attacks, mitigation platforms and appliances are sometimes equipped with a robust infrastructure and advanced detection and monitoring technology. You’ll make things much easier on yourself and be thankful you probably did when a hypothetical attack becomes real. 

Liquid Web’s DDoS Protection Services may also help your site stay protected against cyberattacks that would cost you data and resources. Stay ahead of the growing trend of DDoS attack prevalence with managed hosting solutions from Liquid Web.